Last month I revealed stats from Elance that showed how the demand for online digital marketing freelancers has soared and so, this time round, I thought I’d look at how this has become a global trend with more and more companies looking to source freelancers from across Europe and further afield.

On Elance, the US is the largest user of human cloud outsourcing, but Europeans have really embraced this way of hiring digital marketing expertise in the last year.

Social media is now central to every savvy job seeker's armour, and recruiters are also switched on to using it to source great candidates.

For the former, it's a source of information. It allows you to get the word out about your search, collate recommendations and connections into an online CV - and build a good reputation in the process.

As a recuiter, the same applies, but in the reverse.

To many marketers, this is fairly standard - but how do consumers feel about this? Are they using social media in their job search?